In the past, people have maintained contact lists on paper. The proverbial “black book” is a good example of a list of individuals and their contact information. Unfortunately, the task of maintaining a large contact list current is often too onerous for the few times one needs to contact each individual.
A service offering automated updating of electronic contact information and ensuring most current contact information is offered by GoodContacts® through their World Wide Web site. GoodContacts® addresses the difficult task of enabling people to stay connected to their many circles of contacts. The service provided by GoodContacts® allows for updating and management of personal information relating to contacts and provides a dynamic link to all personal and professional relationships. This is performed by providing a method for each user to transmit to other users requests for information updates, thereby allowing for automatic updating of the user contacts within their address book.
Although the service that GoodContacts® provides does automate this tedious process, it only provides benefits once an individual is within a contact list. Thus, until the individual is within the contact list, the service cannot maintain contact with that person. Of course, though this seems make sense, there are times when one does not even realise that an individual is not within their contact list. For example, one may correspond with another party cc'ing a third party in all correspondence back and forth without ever realising the cc'ed individual is not within their contact list. Later, when it becomes important to contact that cc'ed individual directly, the contact information may already have been lost.
Yahoo.com provides also an opportunity to update a contact list when a reply option is chosen for sending a message to the contact person who has sent a message. Inconveniently, there is no discrimination between the addresses already saved in the address book. The service always offers the option of saving an address regardless of its existence in the address book.
Similarly, Hotmail.com offers the possibility to update the contact list of a sending party when a message is newly sent or when a message in sent in reply to an address that is not part of the existing contact list.
Inconveniently, email programs provide a method for inserting a party into an email address book only when a sending party is about to send an email message. Of course, many people merely reply to add the contact to their address book thereby causing inconvenience to both parties. Unfortunately, it is not always evident that a new contact is present within a message. For example, a committee membership may change slightly and go unnoticed by many of the individuals within the committee.
Therefore, it would be advantageous to provide a system for notifying a user that an email includes address information not existing in the address book.